There from the beginning;
with love, for Giles.
Contents
FROM BELSIZE PARK TO BOW
Today, I might win a quarter of a million dollars.
There are only eleven opponents to beat. Unfortunately, they are the eleven toughest poker players in the world. According to the title of this televised battle, we are The Premier League.
Phil ‘The Brat’ Hellmuth is playing: he’s won eleven world titles. Dave ‘Devilfish’ Ulliott is there: the most feared and celebrated player in Britain. Marcel Lüske, ‘The Flying Dutchman’, is in the line-up: he’s such a big star now, he is releasing albums of himself singing poker songs. Between them, my opponents have won fifty million dollars playing cards.
So I’m a little nervous. The minicab, sent by the production company, has been waiting outside for ten minutes while I hunt around my flat for keys, phones, lipstick, newspaper for the lunchbreak, £5,000 packet in case of a cash game in the hotel afterwards, pen, tissues, apple. I run out of the house pretty flustered and we have been cruising down Haverstock Hill for some time before I notice that the eyes in the driving mirror have a familiar mournful crinkle.
I say, ‘Ray? Is that you?’
I met Riverboat Ray at a cash game somewhere round the back of Islington in about 1999. He stuck in my mind after he told a miserable story about losing a poker hand five years before. He recounted every card and every bet on every street of the hand, as bitterly as if it had been five minutes ago. Later that evening, he mentioned that he had a new granddaughter. ‘What’s her name?’ I asked. Ray frowned, thought for a while, then shook his head. ‘Nope. It’s gone.’
I haven’t seen him for ages. Now, here he is at the wheel of my courtesy car. Ray tells me he’s been banned from the casino in Luton for three years, after a fight with Frank Farnham. It was all to do with an Omaha Hi-Lo hand where Ray is heads-up with Frank Farnham’s dad, and Frank Farnham’s dad says that Ray has won the pot with three of a kind, but then Frank leans over his dad’s shoulder and points out that he has a straight. Frank Farnham has no business doing this, especially in a significant £200 pot, and it all turns ugly, and the car park is mentioned, and now Riverboat Ray is writing letter after letter to the card room manager in Luton to try and get himself reinstated.
I think about that old Islington game, and how frightened I would have been to lose a £200 pot. There were no televised tournaments then, no celebrities, no courtesy cars. None of that stuff existed in poker when I first met Riverboat Ray and I never saw it coming. I didn’t want it, either. Poker wasn’t about fame, it was about hiding.
But now here I am, lounging about in the back of a complimentary taxi, swept through London to be made up and photographed and settled at a table to take my shot at a million-dollar prize pool with a bunch of famous faces, while Ray is writing letters to try and get himself reinstated at the £50 table in Luton.
Why me? Why me and not him? How come I get to be Queen Alice, gliding across the chessboard to be crowned, while Ray is still the White Knight sitting on a gate?
Waiting to take the left-hand filter at Kings Cross, graciously wishing me luck, Riverboat Ray is probably wondering
